This release focuses on a complete refactor of the internal database abstraction layer (DBAL). We have been using [gobuffalo/pop](https://github.com/gobuffalo/pop) successfully in [ORY Kratos](https://github.com/ory/kratos) and decided to move the ORY Hydra DBAL to [gobuffalo/pop](https://github.com/gobuffalo/pop) as well. As part of this refactoring, ORY Hydra now supports SQLite for both in-memory as well as on-disk databases, de-duplicating the codebase and allowing for quick and easy persistence in test environments. This is an alpha release as we want to gather feedback from the community regarding performance and other potential issues before tagging the v1.9.0 version branch as stable.